Katy makes plans to pay for city police building renovations

Published 5:30 am, Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Katy City Council has agreed informally to use nearly half of the city's reserves to pay for the $4.83 million remodeling and expansion of the police building at 5456 Franz Road.

The council's formal vote on the decision will probably come at its next regular meeting, on April 10.

This week's non-binding decision came during a special workshop held to discuss the project and how to pay for it.

City Administrator Johnny Nelson said previously that he expected it to cost about $4.2 million to remodel the existing 11,818-square-foot-building and add another 14,328 square feet on the structure's east side.

After the bids were opened March 2 and the lowest bid was about 10 percent higher than expected, city officials and Bay Architects of Houston started looking at ways to save money on the project.

They came up with a list of cost-cutting measures, such as reducing the size of the visitors parking lot and using plastic instead of copper pipes, that would have trimmed about $105,000 from the total cost.

But, after discussing several of those measures Wednesday, council decided to leave them in the project, saying the money that could be saved was a small percentage of the total cost.

The council also decided to use reserve money to pay for the project rather than wait and include the police construction in a bond election planned for May 2007.

Katy Treasurer Byron Hebert said Katy currently has a little more than $10 million in its reserves that is not committed to other purchases or construction projects.

City financial advisor Gene Shepherd, who is with the firm RBC Dain Rauscher, told the council that paying for the police station construction with reserve money would not weaken the city's financial position with major bond companies.

He did suggest the council pass a special resolution saying they intend to maintain the city's reserve fund so it could cover half the city's annual operating expenses.